Television, Processed Foods Couldn't Be More Proud Of Child They Raised

Gotta love The Onion

Television, Processed Foods Couldn't Be More Proud Of Child They Raised


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New St. Boniface Haiti Foundation Documentary

Filming for this documentary took place earlier this year.  It's fantastic.  Thank you so much Pierre Valette and family.

Wisdom

Pa kouri pou lapli epi ou tonbe nan rivye

Don't run for the rain or you'll fall in the river

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Gift

Zynga’s FarmVille gamers donate to Haiti’s poor via virtual goods

As much as I like to grumble about all the FarmVille updates I get on my Facebook, and I can't understand for the life of me the attraction of playing, this kind of blows me away.  Almost a half a million dollars from the players is being given to the poor of Haiti via Fonkoze and FATEM.

Check it out

Now if only we could get St. Boniface signed up somehow...

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Is it wrong to want to have a nap at 10:30 in the morning?

I'm too tired to think of a title...

I spent today working with the malnutrition program.  It was chaos.  To say we need to do some reorganizing and advance planning before Tuesday comes is an understatement.  Today, for some reason unclear to me, we combined the program with vaccinations too.

I worked as all-around gopher, baby-weigher, and interviewer.  I love weighing the kids, and especially love it when they've gained weight.  Today we had four kids reach normal weight, so we gave a small gift/reward of bath soap to the moms.

Two children went from underweight to severely underweight, so we enrolled them in our Plumpy'nut program (we have switched from Medika Mamba).  Plumpy'nut is a peanut butter based supplement that can help children gain weight fairly quickly.  It comes in little foil packets and is "prescribed" based on the child's weight, that is for a certain weight they need to eat a certain number of packets each day.  Each packet contains 500 kcals, lots of protein and vitamins and minerals..

Part of the enrollment process is an interview, measurements, and letting the child do a taste test of the Plumpy'nut - no sense sending them home with it if they won't eat it.  Sometimes the child is sick and does not feel like doing much.  Doesn't smile, cries when you do the measurements, and just wants to be left alone. We look at their skin, check for any signs of edema, check if their hair is red.

The most enjoyable part is when you squeeze a little bit of Plumpy'nut in their mouth.  It tastes really good and I don't know of any child who hasn't liked it.  The first three I gave a taste to today liked it, one even smiled for me, and they sat and waited for the next taste.

The fourth however, was like a hungry little bird.  She had been crying, didn't want to be touched and was generally cranky.  I put a little in her mouth, she stopped crying and kept sticking her head out to get a little more.  I had to pull it away so she didn't take it too fast. I had a nice discussion with her mother while she was eating it - she has 8 other children. We had to refer them to another program closer to where they live, but we got the child started on Plumpy'nut with a few days supply until then.

There's a lot of debate about what is the correct way to approach child malnutrition in developing countries, what foods to give as food aid, and where it should come from.  It's a very complex picture encompassing nutrition science, food policy, and international policy.  I'm learning more about it, but the more I learn the less clear it becomes.

One thing I know for sure is that products like Plumpy'nut and Medika Mamba work.  The kids in our program who receive it will gain weight well if they follow the protocol and there isn't any sharing going on in the household.  We don't have 100% success, but we do know it works.

Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain

It's been a pretty dry rainy season.  Up until now we had a few light showers that didn't amount to much.

This weekend however, we got a really good soaking each day.  I am happy because it means that the cistern at Kay Granmoun will fill and they won't have to carry water again for a while.

Today it was cloudy almost all day, and we had heavy showers all afternoon.  While my heart is happy that the cisterns are filling and the dry soil is soaking up water to nourish the corn and millet, I know what the rain means to many people here - it makes a hard life miserable.

A man was carried to hospital from Savanne Henri this afternoon on a makeshift stretcher.  They would have had to carry him across a swollen and dangerous river. It probably took them 3-4 hours to get here, which means they walked in the worst of the rain and mud.  I saw the men in the yard.

There were many mothers who came today to get rations from our nutrition programs.  They waited half the morning for things to start, sitting on the steps and crouching on the ground.  The depot doors opened to start dispensing the rations only to have the heavens crack and soak the women who weren't able to find shelter under the eaves or in the doorways.  Their food would get wet on the way home, and the mud would be slippery and dangerous in some places.

There are people tonight who are trying to sleep on wet beds, in wet thatch-roofed houses.

Happy Thanksgiving

At home, this is my favourite weekend of the year.  When I lived in the US, I just couldn't get into Thanksgiving in November, so I usually worked that holiday.

I am missing the crisp air, the bright orange and red and neon yellow maple leaves. The smell of Fall.

We will have the usual Sunday chicken here today, so maybe I'll pretend it's turkey... but it'll be a stretch to pretend the stuffing, gravy, squash, and apple pie.

So, to those of you who get to celebrate this weekend, remember to savour it.  There are those of us who wish we could be there.


** To my family, I wish I could be with you.  I miss you all so much.

Torture

I am torturing myself with magazines.  No, not fashion or travel, but Bon Appetit and Southern Living.

What I wouldn't give right now for carmel-pecan-pumpkin bread pudding, or real macaroni and cheese, or sage butter-roasted turkey with cider gravy...

Sensations

I woke up this morning, early, to the sound of cicadas.  I have two fans on at night and it very easily drowned out the noise of the fans.  I thought they were in the tree outside my window, but it went on for a while, fully awakening me, so I got up to have a look.

There was one cicada on the screen of my bathroom window, and a few inches away was the little zandolit (gecko) that lives there.  I watched them for a while. I think he was debating whether he was going to try to eat the cicada, which was more than two-thirds his size.  I touched the screen and they both disappeared.

It's these little experiences, as silly and trivial as they are, that I hope to remember about Haiti when I leave.  Yesterday I was sitting at the peasant bank, Fonkoze, waiting to get called in to see the teller. I was absorbing all that was going on around me.  The strong sun and the sensation of sitting in the shade of the galleri with a breeze blowing through. The sounds of the businesses and homes surrounding the bank.  The smell of frying food and the sound of konpa on the radio at the restaurant next door.  The chatter of the other people waiting.  I hope I can remember those sensations, as they are an integral part of my experience here.

A satisfying week

We had a very busy week here.  We hosted a mini-forum on malnutrition and invited people from our partner organizations and the ministry of health.

We have six community nutrition programs, but I have been focusing mostly on what we call the recuperation program, which is a program for moderately to severely underweight kids from 6-59 months of age (these are the children without medical complications, like kwashiorkor).  We haven't been having good results with weight gains, and have been examining the reasons why.  We held the mini-forum as a means to learn from our partners and present our situation to them.

Some of our visitors arrived the night before and stayed with us at the residence.  There was informative discussion around the table.  Dr. Marhonne, the head of nutrition for the ministry of health, was very interesting to talk to.  She brought with her a young doctor who is doing his residency at the General Hospital and specializing in nutrition.  He and I had a great discussion in my limited Kreyol about nutrition support in intensive care, a topic that we wouldn't be covering at the mini-forum but was fun to talk about just the same. I kind of miss my clinical work.

We also had visitors from Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health) and their agricultural branch, Zanmi Agrikol. These included their chief of nutrition, their top agronomist and a pharmacist.  Part of our presentation at the mini-forum was about agriculture in our region, as it is an important factor when looking at food security.

Our programs at St. Boniface are supported by the generosity of Catholic Relief Services, who sent a large contingent.  They presented on their nutrition programs and their partnership with us, emphasizing that we are focusing on nutritional health, not feeding programs.  I think that is an important distinction.

I presented an overview of our program and some statistics.  I also presented on the process we've undertaken to identify our problems, the things we would like to improve, and how our overall goals fit into the mission of St. Boniface Haiti Foundation.

One thing I liked best about the day is that our whole community health team got to participate.  We had some of the community volunteers, health agents, and even a few of the mothers from the program come. They got to see, most for the first time, what is discussed at forums like this.

Our other staff worked very hard too.  We fed approximately 50 people a mid-morning snack and a large lunch.  The food was wonderful (we had grapes!!!!!)  We've never held a function like this before, and every chair and utensil in the residence was used.  Everyone worked so hard to make it a success.

I sometimes forget why I am here.  I struggle with whether I am a missionary or a humanitarian aid worker.  Usually, I think I'm just doing aid work.  As we were opening the forum yesterday and singing the Kreyol version of How Great Thou Art before praying, I realized that I am both.  I am here because God loves me, and he is asking me to show that love to others.  Somewhere in the spreadsheets, cheque requests, market lists, and running up and down the stairs to the nutrition center, I am showing that love even without knowing it.